Lover Beware 04 - Only Human

"This the guy you're waiting for?"
    She turned. Rule stood beside the officer at the edge of the lights cast by the police spots. His face was shadowed, his expression shuttered. He was wearing black.
    Rule waited for Lily to come to him. He was a patient man, he reminded himself. Which was just as well. He would need to be. If she felt what he did, she was fighting it. Maybe she Only Human
    273
    felt nothing more than a sexual buzz. He rubbed his chest, but the ache wasn't one he could touch.
    The scents were rich here, away from the nose-clogging odors of the city. The green smells of growing things mingled in a pattern too complex to easily yield its separate notes, but he was aware of creosote, cypress and sumac, wild mustard and cholla. The lake, invisible from where he stood, was a rich, damp presence blending water, fish, a whiff of decay. He smelled dust and people, one or more of whom gave off the faint, sour tang of fear.
    The ground was hard and dry beneath his feet. A lumpy three-quarter moon squatted near the horizon, peering at them through the dark lace of leaves in the trees to his right. He felt its pull in his blood, a song without words or notes: one long, slow pulse timed to a rhythm those around him would never hear.
    He couldn't see the body. Too many people were in the way. But he smelled blood, sweet and sharp. And waste, the body's involuntary surrender to the insult of sudden death.
    Lily stopped in front of him, her pretty black eyes flat and official, but the pulse in her throat throbbing. “Thank you for coming right away."
    "I want the killing stopped, too."
    She nodded and turned. "This way."
    The smell of blood grew heavier as he followed. A couple of the people standing near the body shifted, and he saw.
    Shock stopped him in his tracks.
    "What is it?"
    His voice came out hoarse. "You didn't tell me it was a woman."
    Lily's frown mixed concern with puzzlement. "Does it matter so much?"
    "It matters." He wasn't over the shock yet, but the rage gathering inside would clear it away soon enough. His hands clenched.
    "Why?" she asked sharply. "I know lupi are patriarchal, but use your head. Carlos Fuentes didn't have any more of a chance than this woman did. Not against a lupus."
    "Forget the PC talk. You don't understand. Women...
    women conceive. They carry babies—our babies, human babies. We don't hurt women. Ever." The rage was rising, threat-274
    EILEEN WILKS
    ening his control. He clenched his hands tightly, throttling back the need to howl, to seek and find the one who had done this. The need to Change.
    Slowly his fists relaxed, and with the release of clenched muscles some of the need drained away. Not now. This wasn't the time or the place, but that time would come. He would make sure of it. "Whoever did this is a rogue," he said, cold and certain. "And subject to our laws as well as yours."
    She closed her hand around his arm as if to hold him back.
    "The law he'll answer to is the one I'm sworn to uphold. Not some weird trial by combat."
    He shook her off and moved to kneel by the body.
    It had been a clean kill, at least. The dead eyes stared up, sightless and shocked, but the woman's face itself was intact, if blood-spattered. Rule picked up one of the cold hands and cradled it gently in his, silently apologizing for what one of his kind had done, promising retribution and asking permission for what he must do. Then he bent and sniffed the gaping wound where her throat had been.
    This was why Lily had asked him to come, after all. The scent would be fresh.
    The first whiff told the tale, but he took his time, wanting to leave no doubt. Then, gently, he laid the dead hand back on the ground and stood.
    Lily was watching. "You know. This time you could tell who it was."
    He jerked his head to the left. "Walk apart with me so I can tell you."
    Her eyebrows went up. After a moment, she nodded. Together they moved farther up the trail the dead woman had taken—fleeing, at the last, from one she couldn't escape.
    He stopped by a scrappy little oak, its leaves whispering to each other in the breeze. They'd left the pool of light from the police spots behind. Here it was dark, and closer to the lake.
    That strong, clean scent cleared some of the other smells from his senses.
    Lily stood close enough for her scent to fill him, too. Not close enough to touch. "What did you learn? Who was it?"
    "Leidolf."
    "Is that a first name or a surname?"
    "It's a clan." The rage was still